Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

Tag Archives: credibility

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, May 1, 2018:

It all started with an Associated Press (AP) tweet: “NRA bans guns at President Trump, VP Pence speeches during it’s [sic] annual meeting in Dallas.” The Washington Post jumped on it, as if it were real news, offering a misleading headline to its story: “The NRA said guns will be banned during a Pence speech; Parkland students see hypocrisy.”

This likely reflected a tweet from one of the “heroes” of the Parkland, Florida, massacre, Cameron Kasky, who is credited with founding the anti-gun group March for Our Lives. Tweeted Kasky: “The NRA has evolved into such a hilarious parody of itself.”

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, April 5, 2018:

It wasn’t the Rasmussen poll on Tuesday that upset members of the mainstream media. They have long since written off Rasmussen’s polls as biased towards Republicans. So when Rasmussen reported on Tuesday that President Trump’s approval rating rose to 51 percent — the third time this year that his rating has been at 50 percent or above — they all but ignored it.

It was the CNN poll from a few days earlier that they couldn’t understand. While that poll, covering 913 individuals from March 22 through 25, still showed Trump’s approval rating at 43 percent, that was a huge jump from previous poll results. As Newt Gingrich explained, “the result was so shocking that CNN commentator Chris Cillizza, who is normally deeply anti-Trump, had to spend time analyzing [the results] in which the president performed so much better in March than he did in February”:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, April 6, 2018:

So committed is the mainstream media in the United States to their purpose – destroy Trump in any way they can – that it took a foreign journalist to point out to them what they are really doing. Writing in the U.S. edition of the liberal British news magazine The Week, journalist Matthew Walther, said:

It’s not surprising that after little more than a year in office, many people who voted for the president still support him. But it’s also surprising that a president who has been the object of more negative reporting than any in our history still enjoys something like the same middling base of support he had before taking office.

Unless it’s the negative reporting that is the problem, which I suspect is very largely the case….

Walther makes the case that if the mainstream media hadn’t abandoned its primary mission as the fourth estate – to bring full-blown fair and honest conversation about current affairs to the public – and instead decided to make its primary, if not only, mission to destroy Trump and his administration, things might be turning out differently:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, November 8, 2017:

Ed Gillespie

The win by Democrat Ralph Northam over Republican Ed Gillespie in the Virginia governor’s race on Tuesday has breathed desperately-needed oxygen into Democrats who have lost race after race since President Trump was elected a year ago. Some have gone over the top, suggesting that it’s the Republican Party that has now become carrion, whose bones will be picked clean in 2018.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, September 25, 2017:

In a wildly sensationalist screed published September 15, the Washington Post burnished its anti-gun agenda without regard to truth. In its “Children Under Fire” piece, the Post seemed to rely on emotional appeals in order to make its point: Youngsters are being shot at a terrible rate and something must be done! The reader is left to imagine just what must be done, but it’s likely to have little to do with supporting the Second Amendment.

Two recent polls show once again that the mainstream media’s attempt to influence the news isn’t working. For years Gallup has been tracking their cratering of credibility, noting last September that “Americans’ trust and confidence in the mass media ‘to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly’ has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history, with [just] 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight percentage points from last year.”

Gallup’s conclusions were backed up by a more recent poll conducted by Harvard-Harris in May this year which learned that

Overshadowed by his remarks concerning North Korea’s “Rocket Man” and the “worst ever” Iranian nuclear deal, President Donald Trump’s views on Venezuela in his speech at the United Nations on Tuesday were soft-pedalled by the mainstream media.

But they were spot on:

The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented but that socialism has been faithfully implemented. From the Soviet Union to Cuba, Venezuela — wherever socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish, devastation and failure.

Those who preach the tenets of these discredited ideologies only contribute to the continued suffering of the people who live under these cruel systems

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, August 30, 2017:

Los Angeles Times Building

The Los Angeles Times reported that on Tuesday the city council was going to repeal its ban on “ultra-compact” handguns that has been in place since 2001. It’s responding to pressure from the NRA and the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) that the city must conform to the roster of firearms already banned at the state level. It’s not because of a change of heart on the part of those council members.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, July 21, 2017:

On Thursday more than 100 staffers at the New York Times, including copy editors and reporters, took their only option: severance packages offered as the paper continues to shrink its print staff.

Though they were warned well in advance, many of those whose jobs were in jeopardy decided to wait until the bitter end, hoping to snag one of the few new job openings at the Times’ digital operations. For many, those final job interviews turned out instead to be offers to take the severance package, as their job skills no longer fit the new paradigm at The Gray Lady.

Red ink has been flowing for years as the Times struggled with a shrinking print audience and a technology that wasn’t keeping up with audiences switching to online media for their information. In January the Times published an internal report, “Journalism That Stands Apart,” crafted by seven of the newspaper’s journalists. It was blunt in its assessment:

The ripple effect from the publishing in January by far-left BuzzFeed of the phony, discredited “Trump Dossier” written by anti-Trump British MI6 agent Christopher Steele is still being felt. As a result of a London lawsuit against Steele, the former British spy was forced to admit that his information, which was obtained from various unnamed Kremlin sources, was never verified as accurate. But that hasn’t deterred Democrats determined to harm or destroy the Trump presidency from using it as fodder for their attacks.

Steele, a confirmed socialist, wrote a series of memos about information he said he had gleaned from various “Kremlin insiders,” a “trusted compatriot,” “former top level Russian intelligence officers still active inside the Kremlin,” and two other unnamed sources he referred to as “sources A and B.” But Steele stumbled when, in memo #16, he claimed that members of the Russian spy service FSB were to meet with one of Trump’s people in a conspiracy to defame Hillary Clinton. Wrote Steele:

Two weeks ago, the world price of crude oil officially entered a bear market, down more than 21 percent from its high early in the year. OPEC’s plan appeared to be on track, taking enough production off the market to drive the price to $60 a barrel. That decline has enormous implications for the cartel’s members, as nearly all of them need the revenues to keep their welfare and warfare states fully funded. The decline must be especially painful for Saudi Arabia, the leader of the pack, which announced plans last year to sell part (estimated to be between five and ten percent) of its precious Saudi Aramco oil company. The company, thanks to deliberately opaque disclosures, was estimated to be worth, depending on the price of oil, between $2 trillion and $10 trillion.

That’s the operative word: “depending.” OPEC had big plans for the funds it hoped to raise, encapsulated as its “Vision 2030.” As Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, the nation’s Chairman of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs, wrote:

In one of the more inane and nonsensical effusions of rejoicing over the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday to let stand a lower court’s anti-gun decision, California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra sullied his credibility and those of similar view with this:

[It’s] welcome news for California and gun safety everywhere. It leaves in place an important and common-sense firearm regulation, one that promotes public safety, respects 2nd Amendment rights and values the judgments of sheriffs and police chiefs throughout the state on what works best for their communities.

This packs more misstatements, half-truths and just plain damnable lies into one paragraph than has been seen in recent years. By disarming its citizens, California has virtually guaranteed an increase in violent crime, especially gun violence. The onerous restrictions on the Second Amendment applied to law-abiding citizens fail to respect it but instead do serious if not fatal damage to it. And as far as judgments by local sheriffs and police officers as to the applicability of the Second Amendment to its citizens, one needs only to bring to mind the history of tyrants operating without restraint.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, June 26, 2017:

A study commissioned by Seattle’s city council just came back with results they didn’t want to hear: Their efforts to raise wages of the city’s lowest-paid workers are instead costing them about $125 a month. This is thanks to their employers cutting their hours in response to the law raising the minimum wage from $10.50 an hour to $13 an hour in 2016.

Mark Long, one of the authors of the University of Washington (UW) study, said:

If you’re a low-skilled worker with one of these jobs, $125 a month is a sizeable amount of money. It can be the difference between being able to pay your rent and not being able to pay your rent.

In addition, the UW study concluded that, thanks to the minimum-wage increase, some 5,000 low wage jobs in Seattle were never created.

The mainstream media, alerted to a Tweet President Trump sent early Wednesday morning indicating that he would nominate high-profile litigator Christopher Wray as FBI director, scrambled to find something negative to say about the choice. The best the New York Times could come up with was that he is a “hybrid pick,” whatever that means, but that the timing was suspicious: “Mr. Trump’s news may represent an attempt to inject credibility [whatever that means] into an investigation [that starts on Thursday].”

CNN likewise could find nothing negative in Wray’s background, so it, the least credible member of the MSM, focused instead on the timing,

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, May 29, 2017:

Will Rogers is credited for noting that “Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.” Andrew McCabe is about to suffer the consequences of not following Will’s wisdom.

When Joe Lieberman withdrew his nomination for FBI Director last week, he claimed it was because of a potential conflict of interest in that he works for the same law firm as Trump’s lawyer who is defending the president against the faux Russia investigation. In reality,

With the withdrawal by former Connecticut Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman from consideration by the Trump administration for the position of FBI director, Andrew McCabe’s (shown) name is one of just four remaining names on the list. On Thursday Lieberman said he was withdrawing because of a potential conflict of interest as a result of being a lawyer in the same firm that is representing Donald Trump in the ongoing Russia/Trump investigation.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, May 19, 2017:

NBC Nightly News broadcast

Thomas Patterson, Harvard’s Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, opened his study of “News Coverage of Donald Trump’s First 100 Days” by noting not only that President Trump was the topic of more than 40 percent of all news stories during his first 100 days (three times the amount of press coverage received by previous presidents), but also that the coverage he received “set … a new standard for unfavorable press coverage of a president.”

What’s surprising isn’t Patterson’s conclusion, which readers of The New American likely agree with, but the source:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, April 20, 2017:

Part of a letter sent to top members of Congress earlier this month and signed onto by 99 churches says: “The charitable sector, particularly houses of worship, should not become another cog in a political machine or another loophole in campaign finance laws.”

Pushback to President Donald Trump’s promises to repeal the Johnson Amendment was expected from the American Humanist Association and American Atheists, and he got it. But from Baptists?

Trump said at a campaign event in Virginia in October, “I think [the Johnson Amendment is] very unfair, and one of the things I will do very early in my administration is to get rid of [it] so that our great pastors and ministers, rabbis … and priests and everybody can go and tell and participate in the [political] process.”

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, April 12, 2017:

Mug shot of Charles Ponzi (March 3, 1882 – January 18, 1949).

The Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General reported in 2015 that nearly half of the nine million people receiving SSI (Supplemental Security Insurance) benefits were being overpaid, running up $17 billion in excess disbursements over the previous 10 years.

Such overpayments were just the beginning of the story. On Monday, a former Kentucky attorney pleaded guilty to filing more than 1,700 false SSI disability claims in a scheme that netted him millions in fees that he lavishly dished out to his co-conspirators: a Social Security administrative law judge and a psychologist, among others. In his plea bargain, former attorney Eric Conn fingered Judge David Daugherty (whom he said birthed the scheme originally) and Dr. Alfred Adkins.

The fees that Conn collected ran into the millions, while Social Security dished out some $550 million in benefits to beneficiaries who willingly participated, some of them saying later that they didn’t really know what was happening but were happy to pay Conn $200 in cash under the table for his “advice” and assurance that their claims would be approved.

Brazil’s economy, once Latin America’s largest and most prosperous, shrank again last year by 3.6 percent following a similar shrinkage in 2015 of 3.8 percent. This marks the country’s worst recessionary period since records started being kept. The best possible scenario for 2017 is an expansion of less than one percent.

The New American has been following the rolling and accelerating disaster since the onset of Operation Car Wash, the investigation into political corruption at the government’s highest levels, which began nearly three years ago. At the time the economy had fallen from a gain of more than 10 percent in 2010, placing Brazil at the top of the BRIC nations (Russia, India, China, South Africa, Brazil) which were touted as contenders to outproduce the Western economies by 2025. No one mentions BRIC any longer.

Instead it’s all about the failing economy and the Operation Car Wash corruption investigation.